


when everything that ticked has stopped

by ThatWeirdGuyInTheBushes



Category: Mr. Robot (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Dehumanization, Dissociation, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Drug Use, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Insomnia, Mental Health Issues, No Dialogue, Non-Linear Narrative, Past Child Abuse, Persistent Depressive Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Schizophrenia, Self-Harm, Smoking, Social Anxiety, the relationships are mostly just subtext tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-07
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:15:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23520676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThatWeirdGuyInTheBushes/pseuds/ThatWeirdGuyInTheBushes
Summary: The Proust Effect refers to the vivid reliving of events from the past through sensory stimuli.Elliot Alderson, dragon-breath, and the history of anger.
Relationships: Darlene Alderson & Elliot Alderson, Elliot Alderson/Angela Moss, Elliot Alderson/Shayla Nico
Comments: 9
Kudos: 39





	when everything that ticked has stopped

**Author's Note:**

> Watched the whole Mr. Robot series in five days. Couldn't get this out of my head so I wrote it all in one sitting. Mostly unedited cause fsociety or smth I don't know.
> 
> The title comes from the poem "It was not Death, for I stood up," by Emily Dickinson.
> 
> Enjoy.

Elliot's adolescence smelled like cigarettes. It was the ever-present fume of his household, the grey ghost around every turned corner, lying in wait.

His mom went through three packs a week. By the time Elliot was eighteen, she and Darlene were practically competing to see who could empty their bank account the fastest.

Mom never needed an ashtray. Elliot's arms can prove it. So can Darlene's.

He didn't start smoking until he was twenty-five.

-

Elliot's eyes close, and he drifts. He doesn't drift into anything, not this time. Not morphine or sleep or the comforting haze of disassociation; He just drifts.

His head feels like it's been replaced with cigarette smoke, his mom's dragon-breath, a seamless transition from solid to gas. His eyes develop a glaze, and the TV slips out of reach.

Elliot tries to anchor himself to something, but everything under his skin just falls through his fingers.

Maybe this is why depression means 'to push down.'

-

Elliot gets diagnosed with a lot of things over the course of his life and for some reason, none of them ever help anything make any more sense.

The doctor who sees him after he tries to kill himself when he's sixteen calls one part of it Schizophrenic tendencies. But she never makes any official ruling so he guesses that doesn't even count.

-

He doesn't remember the first cigarette burn he ever got but he does remember the last. It was two days before he moved out. He was revising his homework at the counter before school started. His mom assumed that he didn't do it last night when she asked him to.

In the hollow of his left wrist, right below the bone of his thumb. If the lighting is good and he squints, he still sees it.

-

Sometimes, he puts out his own cigarettes on his arm. Mostly he doesn't. He doesn't like it, and he has an ashtray and a kitchen counter for a reason.

Sometimes, though. Sometimes the world is just too big. Sometimes it feels like all people are bad people and like Elliot is just a failure because not even bad people want him. Sometimes the world just needs to be small, and the end of a cigarette is the only thing in the world that's smaller than him. And he moves on, eventually, so it's not that bad, but he wouldn't still have burn scars if only his mom had hurt him.

(Sometimes it's just about hurting himself before anyone else can. He likes that explanation a lot less. He won't ever tell Krista about this, but if he did he would say the first reason.)

-

Elliot's twenties smelt mostly like the air that came out the back of computers and coffee. He made so much coffee that his house reeked of it. He filled his cup too high a lot. If his hoodie wasn't black then it would look like a bad tye-dye job with only brown-orange-coffee-coloured paint.

He washes it frequently. Not frequently enough. His twenties smell like computers and coffee.

His boss likes to tell him to get more sleep. When Elliot got older, all of his wrinkles went straight to his eyes, but he doesn't think that's why Gideon says it.

-

Elliot is vehemently anti-NRA but he still keeps a gun in his sock drawer. The dresser is right next to his door, just in case.

He doesn't know if he's ever felt safe a single time in his life, and he doesn't know if that's a normal person thing or if it comes alongside other stuff he doesn't understand like Schizophrenic tendencies, but he doesn't think he'll ever get to know so it doesn't really matter.

He told Darlene about that once when she asked about the tape over his webcam and if it was related to the men in black that were following him (And everyone swears it's a hallucination but it's _real,_ it is) and she seemed to think that it mattered a lot.

But who gives a shit what she thinks?

(He never tells her about the gun, so that's probably a good sign of _exactly_ who.)

-

Shayla's apartment smelled like dark chocolate and weed.

Shayla just smelled like dark chocolate.

He doesn't want to have to miss her anymore.

-

He can't sleep right. He hasn't had any caffeine in two days but he also hasn't slept yet because-

He doesn't even fucking know why.

His vision is blurry and his head is pounding and he blacks out a little when he stands up but he has to go to work now so he just gives up and brews himself a pot. He might not be able to sleep but at least he can afford to pay the bills.

Maybe that's the moment that capitalism stopped being a general offence and started being a personal one. Or maybe it's always been personal, and that was just the start of his workaholic tendencies.

He doesn't remember things right, as if he needs more problems.

Work smells like hand sanitizer and negative space.

-

He tries his first cigarette because of a panic attack. He isn't trying to calm himself down, though. It's been days since he freaked out.

He's just pissed that he can't get over it.

It was just Angela, lighting a cigarette as they sat on the couch together, and for some fucking reason, he couldn't stop seeing his mom.

He tells he has to go to the bathroom and then spends the next seven minutes hyperventilating as quietly as possible and trying not to cry.

Angela goes home, eventually. He feels pathetic, and the expression 'down to the bone' applies because it feels like somebody's gone and scraped the feeling into his solar plexus from the inside.

He's trying to prove to himself that it isn't a big deal.

(It is, at first, but he doesn't really remember it that well. It's easier every time. Krista would call it desensitization, he thinks. But he's not a shrink, so what the fuck does he know?)

-

He doesn't have enough sensory memories related to Darlene. He wishes he did. He wishes he could remember everything about her and know exactly what to trust her with and protect her from because he thinks that might make him a good brother but he just doesn't. He doesn't know how to help Darlene.

He spends a lot of his late-night waking time thinking about her. He doesn't want her to end up like him, but he's scared that she's on the track for it. He wishes her childhood didn't smell like cigarettes but it does and he can't change it, so he just hopes that her future is better.

Morphine doesn't have a smell, but if it did it would smell like Elliot. Or maybe it would be the other way around. He wonders if morphine would smell like being lonely, or if being lonely would smell like morphine.

He doesn't want Darlene's twenties to smell like loneliness. He'll do anything to stop that except talk to her. He doesn't know if being lonely is contagious.

(If it is, Elliot wonders who he caught it from.)

-

He wanted to scream at his mom a lot. Or maybe that's not right, because _wanted_ implies past tense.

He wants to scream about a lot of things and a lot of them come back to his mom. He doesn't know how to start those kinds of conversations, though, doesn't know if he can. Somewhere between the bits of the world that are all ones and zeroes, there's people, and talking, and how do you talk about things like that?

_Cigarettes can make me panic and I don't like loud noises and I'm scared to be wrong and you never taught me how to be a real person so how does anyone expect me to be one now and-_

Maybe he could just say them like that, and it's just a matter of programming the right input. He doesn't know what he expects the output to be, though. He doesn't know what he wants it to be.

It's probably just better not to say it. He's never heard anyone say anything like that before, so he's got to assume that nobody really learned how to be a person either and they're just better at faking it.

A part of Elliot just wants the problem to be him. If he's the problem, and if he just can't function like a person can because of how his brain has always worked and cause of his own self-isolation then he can fix it. He can search through the backed-up data of his memories and find the critical point of failure where everything went wrong and then he can fix himself.

He doesn't know how to fix what other people have managed to do. Other people are a whole different monster entirely.

-

Krista is a nice person who smells like rose perfume and feels like her office. Krista feels stable. He doesn't want to turn her into an object just to help himself, but she's the only thing in the ocean that isn't sinking.

He doesn't know what that metaphor really means, but it feels like it should make sense, so he lets it.

-

Angela smells like lemon shampoo. She likes it because her mom's shampoo smelled like strawberries, and this is the closest she can get without breaking.

He doesn't know if she remembers telling him that because they were both pretty high, but he hopes that she doesn't. He doesn't want her to remember him saying he wouldn't tell, because then she might try to trust him with something else, too, and he'll have to push her away for a while. He doesn't want to, but he's afraid of her being too close when the rest of the world figures out that he's just maladaptive hardware. A trojan horse disguising himself as a real person until somebody manages to pull off the mask and reveal all the broken cogs and fried circuit boards that have to be underneath his skin for him to be this dysfunctional.

He even hates himself for not wanting Angela there, because he always has to make it about him.

-

His father smelled like linoleum tiles and gasoline.

His jacket smells like neither.

Elliot's olfactory memory is amazing, and so is his memory association, so he doesn't know why his father is so mixed up.

Cigarettes mean pain, and dark chocolate means happiness, and lemons mean I love you, and he knows exactly where each feeling stemmed from.

Linoleum tiles still smell like childhood, just as they should.

But for reasons Elliot might never understand, gasoline has always smelled like _fear._


End file.
